The unraveling of a cat tale

By Jacqueline Sweet

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!” warned Donald Trump during the September 10 presidential debate. Seemingly flabbergasted by his own allegation, his voice rose as he pushed the point forward, delivering his rhetorical cat de grâce. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats! They’re eating the pets of the people that live there!”

After Trump’s now-infamous declaration, there were a few ways we as a public could respond. Laughing out loud would be the most obvious. Less obvious would be the route taken by conservative activist Christopher Rufo. For Rufo, the cat hunters would become the hunted.

The day after the debate, he offered a reward on Twitter: “Alright, let's settle it: I will provide a $5,000 bounty to anyone who can provide my team with hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. Deadline is Sunday. Go.”

Three days later, Rufo had apparently hit feline gold, or at least bronze: He re-posted a blurry Facebook video of several small animal carcasses on a cheap blue foldable grill. It wasn’t Springfield (it was Dayton) and the alleged cooks were not Haitian immigrants (they were Rwandan) but still, it was something for them to hang a cat tale on. 

The two triumphantly delighted in the discovery as a takedown of the “establishment media” and those who had been serially debunking the Haitian rumors. “EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer,” Rufo celebrated. 

They were eager to claim a victory after a string of embarrassing losses from right wing influencers and politicians: A supposed Haitian migrant eating a cat in Canton, Ohio, turned out to be an American citizen in a drug or mental health crisis. A Reddit post of an alleged Haitian man snatching geese for dinner from a local park was found to be a man removing roadkill in Columbus, Ohio. 

Even though some of the claims were comical in their absurdity, they led to a serious crisis in Springfield: Bomb threats led to the closures of schools and offices; a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe camped out in town and some Haitians, the majority living legally under Temporary Protected Status, reported fearing for their lives. The parents of a young boy killed in a bus accident by a Haitian driver tearfully begged politicians to stop using their son’s death as a political tool.

But Rufo’s apparent discovery put a pep in the step of the cat crowd. On September 14, Trump running mate JD Vance shared Rufo’s post of the supposed cats on the grill, writing, “Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves. Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”

The next day on CNN, Vance was feeling his kibbles and bits. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked him how he could defend spreading fake stories in Springfield, he responded, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

When pressed on the embarrassing admission, Vance’s defenders pointed to the Dayton cats: Okay, went the reason, perhaps we whiffed on Springfield but in nearby Dayton, it’s open season on Garfield.

The video itself, though, was ambiguous. Were those really cats? Or were those chickens or something else? No matter, Rufo said, he had proof in the form of some impressive shoe-leather reporting.

So I visited Dayton for Drop Site News, and tracked down the infamous blue grill. It turns out there are a lot of holes in that shoe leather. 

The on-the-ground reporting

Rufo’s investigative team was led by a young New York City–based writer named Benjamin Roberts who goes by the moniker Radical Benjamin on Twitter, and who had been in Springfield, Ohio since September 9, posting videos of junked cars and talking to “a local mother [detailing] Haitian abuse of charitable services”—an account of Haitian immigrants taking second helpings from a free hot-food truck.

Roberts, 25, was “on the ground” in Springfield for IM—1776, an online “art and literature for dissidents” magazine where he is an associate editor and writer. IM—1776 is run by an Italian national named Mark Granza living in Hungary; Rufo has collaborated with IM—1776 extensively before. 

Rufo and Roberts co-authored a blog post published on Rufo’s Substack on September 14 titled, “The Cat Eaters of Ohio.”

Rufo and Roberts wrote that they had located a video posted on Facebook in August of 2023 “depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbecue.”

After finding the original video, identifying the man who filmed it, and figuring out the location of the home where it was filmed (more on this later), I visited the home, a rental home divided into two units. The family living there at the time of the video—the owners of that blue grill—had moved out in late summer, the new residents told me. The family there now had recently relocated to Dayton, Ohio, from North Carolina, the mother of the family said when I visited. They said they didn’t know the previous residents of the unit and had no insight into their dietary habits. The blue grill was still in the yard.

The mother of the family currently living in the unit was not home when Benjamin, as they called him, visited. Roberts instead found two other members of the family: a teenage girl and her grandfather, who does not speak any English. The girl recognized a photo of Roberts and confirmed she did indeed show him the blue grill that the previous tenants had left behind when they moved out this past summer, and translated Benjamin’s questions for her grandfather.

The infamous blue grill. Photo by Sweet.

In the unit next door, a 14-year-old boy and his mother also recognized Roberts’ photo and confirmed that he did come by their home last month. There, too, Roberts relied on the teenager as a translator, as the mother spoke essentially no English.

These folks had known the family who was living next door when the video alleging cat-eating was taken. I showed them the most damning paragraph in the story:

“One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. ‘Her dad was going to find meat’ she said. ‘Her dad was going, holding a knife.’”

The mother and an older female relative in that unit both laughed when the quote from the Rufo piece was read to them, via a neighbor translating. The mother vehemently denied saying anything about her former neighbor hunting cats in the neighborhood.

“I would never say anything about any of my neighbors hunting cats,” she said, through the translator, raising her voice, gesturing to the row of homes on the street, “because I know that is not something that we do.”

She said her husband was not home when Roberts visited, and denied that any other adult in her household would have made similar allegations.

The teenage boy in this neighboring unit, the oldest of several children home with his mother when I visited last week, said he would have been the only one who could have made or translated the comment. He adamantly denied that he ever said anything about his former neighbor hunting in the neighborhood. He also denied that he translated anything from his mother about a knife, or hunting cats, or hunting meat in the neighborhood.

“She didn’t say that,” he said. “She said he” – the family in question’s father – “went to the store and that they had cookouts every Friday night in front of the house.”

“Maybe it’s someone else who said it, but not us,” the mother said.

That someone else lives in a neighboring unit. According to a transcript of Roberts’ interview provided to us by a representative of Rufo, the source of the “knife” claim is a neighboring girl. The transcript goes as follows:

Benjamin Roberts: What’s up guys?

Girl: Can I see the picture?

…

Benjamin Roberts: We’re looking for this grill. It was in front of that fence, but this was last year in August. And it’s cats there on the grill. So like, do you know maybe who lived there before? I’m about to go talk to grandpa again. But have you seen a grill like that? Anybody around here?

Girl: Wait. Yeah, this is like, the other grandpa moved like a month ago.

Benjamin Roberts: Oh, they moved here a month ago? Yeah, that’s what they told me. That’s right.

Girl: Yeah. But another people was in the house. They moved.

Benjamin Roberts: Ah, okay. So they’re not there now.

Girl: Yeah. That was our neighbors, or, their neighbors, they were saying they go gonna get meat. Her dad was going to find meat.

Benjamin Roberts: Her dad was going to find meat. Oh wow. Do you know where they were from?

Girl: Huh?

Benjamin Roberts: Were they from the Congo too or no?

Girl: Maybe.

Benjamin Roberts: Maybe. Okay.

Girl: Yeah, her dad was going, holding a knife.

Benjamin Roberts: Oh, the dad was going with a knife?

Girl: Yeah.

…

Benjamin Roberts: He just had a knife and he was going to go find meat?

Girl: Uh huh.

Benjamin Roberts: Interesting. Wow. Okay. That’s cool. I’m going to talk to grandpa too. Thank you guys. Appreciate it.

The family who had lived next door with the blue grill had at least three young children and moved downtown, the neighbors said. We were unable to reach the family. The landlord confirmed that the family had moved and that they were Rwandan.

What animals are on the grill in the video is unclear—the video is filmed at a distance, through a badly-reflecting window. Rufo says there are two cats, but many see chickens. What some on Twitter saw as a cat’s tail sticking straight up, however, is the dark gap between the fence slats behind the grill, a negative space optical illusion that read as a cat tail to those who wanted to see cats.

The fence slat that became a cat tail:

The video

“Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood 😱” the 17-second long video was captioned. The video was indeed posted on a Dayton, Ohio man’s personal Facebook page on August 25, 2023. The man’s reflection is visible in the video, as he films from inside a nearby window.

When contacted by Rufo, the filmer explained he was picking up his son at the son’s mother’s house, who lived next door. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill,” he told Rufo.

When I identified and contacted the man, he wrote back a simple message: He sent a dollar sign emoji face.

Reached by phone a few minutes later, the man asked, “What kind of information do you need? Maybe I can help you out,” before hanging up and not responding to further calls or messages. Roberts did not respond to requests for comment.

Rufo posted on X shortly after he published his “Cat Eaters” story that a source in his personal network who sent him the link to the man’s Facebook video did not request or receive his $5,000 monetary reward.

The filmer’s son’s mother, who lived next door to the blue grill owners until recently, seemed to support Rufo’s and Roberts’s narrative. She said she didn’t remember the names of anyone in that family—“I have no idea because they have those African names”—though, she said, “I would allow my son to play with the kids.”

She said she suspected the family was grilling cats because of an incident she witnessed.

“One day when I first moved over there, I pulled up, and I couldn’t tell you what animal it was, but they had it on the concrete, and they had hatchets, and they were just hatcheting away to the animal, blood everywhere,” in front of their house, she recounted.

She thought the parents understood English, she said, because she had “issues with them parking in [her] driveway,” and they seemed to understand her when she spoke to them about it. “But of course they are going to talk in their language and act like they don’t understand.” 

After asking how big the story had gotten and being told that it had been shared by Vance, she joked, “maybe I need to be calling him…I need some money.”

Congolese prisons and Rwandan refugees

Jean Damascene Harelimana runs The House of the People in Dayton, a charity that became dedicated to assisting and sheltering Rwandan refugees in the mid-1990s.

“Rwandans do not eat cats or dogs,” he said. “It is simply not part of our culture.”

Dayton was one of the first American cities to accept refugees from the Rwandan genocide beginning in 1995 and recently refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been settling in the city—some Rwandan, some Burundi, who were resettled in refugee camps in the Congo during the long years of conflict there.

Dayton’s population has declined to half of what it was in the 1960s, and although the immigrant population has been increasing, immigrants make up only about 5 percent of the population per the most recent Census numbers.

So far Dayton has escaped the chaos and national attention that is still plaguing Springfield. Trump has been continuing to repeat an unintelligible story about Congolese immigrants at recent rallies, one he has been offering versions of since at least March. 

“These people are among the worst in the world. They come from the Congo in Africa, many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is but they come out of jails in the Congo,” he said on Tuesday in Milwaukee. U.S. interventions in Congo helped bring down the country’s democracy and usher in the Mobutu dictatorship, which led to a civil war that destabilized the country for decades.

Roberts has continued writing posts for IM—1776 about immigrants in Ohio. His latest suggests that Springfield’s mayor, the local government, charities, and even churches are part of a conspiracy of corruption for providing legal services to legal immigrants.

Roberts insinuates that the mayor of Springfield is nefariously profiting off immigrants through rental properties. And he writes critically about churches helping Haitians in Springfield: “And the local government may actually be the least compromised of all the bad actors operating in Springfield. The churches, entrusted to care for their neighbors, have decided to interpret this edict by siding with recent arrivals.”

As for Vance, his connection to IM—1776 is stronger than just a one-off. His press secretary, promoted in August, worked for a board member of the nonprofit that publishes IM—1776 in 2022. The board member tweeted approvingly this week about Roberts’s work, writing: “An editor of IM has been in Springfield and has brought to the public more of the fine written journalism the publication has become renowned for.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, this story originally misnamed Congo’s dictator. In its original version, the article suggested the most damning paragraph appeared to come from a neighboring unit, where residents flatly disputed the claim that the neighbors ever grilled cats. A third neighbor, however, a girl spoken to by Roberts, was the source of the “knife” quote, according to a representative of Rufo, though the neighbor is described in the original article as “adjacent.” The story has been updated to include the transcript of Roberts’ interview with the young girl.